But what did he do this time, though? I don't understand it very well, but it sounds like they made an anti-spam solution the default? That is good, right? WP gets a lot of spam.
This one certainly does seem to require a bit more direct knowledge of WP to interpret than I have compared to some of the others. It sounds like the strongest argument against it that is that he previously has been against plugins being listed in the default page and that he doesn't seem particularly open to having published guidelines for what merits being there by default, which means that what belongs there essentially is left up to whatever he decides with no one else having a clear picture of it.
In a vacuum, probably not a huge deal, and maybe for people who actually use WP the idea that this is basically something up to a judgment call makes sense. At least from my outside perspective, it sounds a bit like what's on the default page is basically being left up to the whim of the CEO without any real concrete explanation, which would be mildly concerning even if the CEO wasn't someone who's been making the news a lot the past couple years from getting into pissing matches with competitors, causing 8.4% of his employees to take a blanket offer to leave: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/automattic-workers-quit-...
I think the less charitable and more honest reading is: he wouldn't have allowed such a commit if it wasn't an Automattic product that benefits. He's been making very clear business decisions and forcing them into the foundation (which he controls) for a while (gutenberg was about wordpress.com's goal of competing with wix.com etc, not about wordpress.org), this is just one of the more aggressive ones, which is why it stands out.
His usual response is "but we're also sponsoring .org with developers" ... yeah, that's true, with developers who do Automattic's bidding and ensure that .org is pursuing .com's needs. He'd have to pay those developers either way, but this way he can call it a charitable donation.
Fair point, although I'd also add that preferential treatment for first-party products is sadly not that surprising when it comes to open source from for-profit companies. It's something that would be disappointing but probably not enough to make me able to recognize this guy's name if he hadn't already been going even further in trying to directly control the ecosystem than this (and causing a bunch of employees to leave in the process)
In a vacuum, yes, that seems weird. But in this context I think it's important to disclose who writes their paychecks so it's easier to understand what their biases might be.
At a dinner party, sure, but if anything we should be this transparent in business and political contexts more often. Who's paying your bills is often very important when outsiders are weighing our choices.
People on the Internet are just so dramatic. "Terrifying". Yes, indeed, this induces "terror", abject fear. Give me a break. At worst it's slightly cringe-worthy. This treadmill of dysphemisms is honestly annoying. At this point, all actions are described in extreme terms as if they're life changing when they're only mildly quirky.
This gets bugged if it takes longer than one tick to run an iteration of game loop. Afaik the typical solution is to have a maximum number of iterations that you'll run and reset accum if it exceeds that.
And that 50% adoption is only as high as it is because China went from almost zero in 2017 to over 80% in 2025 after they included IPv6 adoption in one of their 5-year plans
The 50% adoption number is based on Google data which doesn't contain users from China, since Google is blocked there. If you added Chinese users the number would probably be closer to 55%.
Not all OS's, unfortunately. I'm on the boat that says conforming to Gnome HIG's is a bad idea.
Just today I had the disk usage analyzer (baobab) open and I was navigating inside directories so I want to go up a directory and clicked on the "<-" left arrow in the headerbar, which went "back" a screen, discarding all the work done scanning the filesystem.
If this app had a traditional menubar and a toolbar this wouldn't have happened.
This is a common type of experience I have every time I use a Gnome app. It almost feels like someone deliberately researched how to make desktop apps as counter-intuitive as possible and implemented that as the policy for some reason.
I have the opposite experience. I have no trouble navigating Gnome apps, and now when selecting an application for a task, I'll choose a Gnome or GTK4 one first. Other apps implement odd controls that don't mesh with the rest of the system.
To me Gnome mostly feels like someone deliberately researched how to make desktop apps as intuitive as possible and implemented that as the policy. And I guess that's what they did, and they did a good job.
For a brief, a very brief moment, between beige Windows 98 and glass-like Windows Vista, we had a "fun" Windows XP. Thinking back it's a bit ironic. For most of history the OS'es didn't look fun, but it was that colorful one I'm most fond of.
And yet XP was widely mocked and hated at the time. Usually as the "Fisher-Price" OS. Personally I never cared too much, it might have been garish in places but the interface under the skin was solid enough: it got out of the way and let me do what I needed to. Likewise for the successor Aero Glass: blingy maybe, but ultimately pretty darn functional (at least by Win7, I somehow managed to skip Vista nearly entirely).
Where I drew the line was Win8: it started to get really hard to actually accomplish tasks in the OS. Win10 walked that back a bit, enough to be tolerable, then Win11 went the other way. I set up a Win11 desktop last week for the first time: what an exercise in unnecessary pain. (And Windows Spotlight backgrounds, one of the few recent MS shove-down-your-throat features that I actually like, doesn't even work reliably and there's no way to find out why. Absolutely no way. Despite an OS with a comprehensive logging system!)
So it's really not correlated with the skin: it's about the functional bones of the UI. A gaming machine needs a functional UI. (Just like everything else!) But the skin on top of that can, and probably should, have some visual distinctiveness and flair. A spinning cube, though... perhaps that is just a little bit too twee?
